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Saturday, April 13, 2013

Good question

So, allow me to ask the impolitic question I have hinted at elsewhere: in choosing to look away, in choosing to under-report, in choosing to spin, minimize, excuse, and move-along when it comes to Kermit Gosnell—and to this whole subject of under-regulated abortion clinics, the debasement of women and the slaughter of living children—how are the press and those they protect by their silence any better than the Catholic bishops who, in decades past, looked away, under-reported, spun, minimized, excused, moved-along, and protected the repulsive predator-priests who have stolen innocence and roiled the community of faith?

Scalia writes further:

The press was quite right (and duty-bound) to report on the shameful failures of our bishops and the sins of our priests. They reported; they followed up. They dug through records. They sought out histories. They looked for more, because they understood that if filth existed in one diocese, it likely existed in others. They courageously did their jobs, unworried about fallout or repercussions; they were looking at a big issue, and were thus unintimidated by big names, and rightly unreserved in their outrage.

Here, I believe, Scalia missteps. The reason the media was "unworried about fallout or repercussions" from reporting on predator priests and the bishops' cover-ups has less to do with any courageousness on their part than confidence there would not be any fallout, of significance at least, from their reporting on it (which, however, in no way reduces the value of those reports). The sad truth is mainstream media fears far less the outrage of officialdom in the Catholic Church than same from the liberal-feminist cultural elite, who over the past decades have made it crystal clear that for them abortion is nothing less than a sacrament, that blaspheming or even questioning it to the slightest degree is subjecting yourself to considerable peril in the public square.